Emma Page - Last Walk Home

She had married him two days after her eighteenth birthday, very much against the wishes of her sister. Janet was eleven years older than Lisa and was now her only close relative; their mother, Mrs Marshall, had died some months before the marriage, leaving Janet as legal guardian to Lisa till she came of age.

‘You’re surely not going to rush into marriage with the first man who’s paid you any serious attention,’ Janet had warned Lisa. ‘It’s madness at your age.’ Particularly when the intended bridegroom was nearly twenty years older than Lisa and was possessed of assets and prospects so meagre as to be practically invisible.

Derek poured himself another cup and returned to the window. He had been overwhelmed by the dead set Lisa had made at him when they first met. She was then only a little over sixteen and had just left school. Mrs Marshall had wanted her to stay on to take a secretarial course but Lisa would have none of it – and when it came to a battle between Lisa and her mother Lisa usually won. She had been born eight months after her father’s death and Mrs Marshall had always cosseted and cherished her second daughter, regarding her as a poor fatherless child to whom the world owed a great deal.

So Lisa threw her school hat in the dustbin, gave her blazer to a jumble sale and then went out and took the first job she could find. This turned out to be at the Cannonbridge Mail Order Company where Derek Schofield daily bent his head over columns of figures. In a matter of days the supper-time conversation at Ivydene became peppered with Derek’s name and within another two or three weeks Lisa was declaring herself madly in love with him.

Both Mrs Marshall and Janet fervently hoped the attachment would wither and die as Lisa grew up and got some sense, but in spite of their opposition – or more probably because of it – she became unshakably determined to marry him. Her mother’s death did nothing to weaken this determination and six months after her mother’s funeral, on a fine spring morning, marry him she did – in the Cannonbridge register office with no friends or relatives present, and two cleaners called in to act as witnesses. Derek was swept up out of his poky bedsitter into the spacious comfort of Ivydene.

Janet Marshall was a schoolteacher, at that time teaching in the neighbouring village of Stanbourne, catching the bus every morning from a stop fifty yards up the road from Ivydene.

When Lisa and Derek returned from their Easter honeymoon in Tangier, Lisa was astounded to discover that Janet had moved out of Ivydene two days earlier. Not only that, but she’d given up her teaching post at Stanbourne and found herself another at Longmead, a village a few miles away. She was renting a small farm cottage close to the Longmead school, had removed a quantity of furniture, china and linen from Ivydene and was already comfortably installed in her new home.

Lisa didn’t stop to unpack her bags but at once commanded Derek to drive her over to Rose Cottage.

‘You never said a word about all this!’ she stormed at her sister. ‘You planned it all behind my back!’

‘You chose to get married against my wishes,’ Janet said calmly. ‘I saw no reason to consult you about my own intentions.’ Derek had stood by, mute and forgotten.

He stared out now at the dewy garden, brilliant in the glittering sunlight. Until Lisa came along he’d managed well enough on what he earned, he had even been able to save. There had been difficulties of course, but nothing he couldn’t handle.

And then Lisa took control of his existence. ‘You’re being exploited,’ she told him. ‘You don’t value yourself properly. You should be getting much more than they’re paying you.’ Easy enough to rectify. All he had to do was approach the boss with righteous confidence and point these matters out to him.

And, fired by Lisa’s total certainty, Derek, shortly after returning from his honeymoon, still a little drunk from the North African sunshine and the astonishing pleasures of marriage, did actually walk in through the manager’s door and put these points to him.

Unfortunately the manager didn’t share Lisa’s opinion. He informed Derek in loud clear tones that it was only by a miracle the firm was surviving at all, he was currently giving serious thought to the question of redundancies. ‘If you’re not satisfied,’ he added, ‘you’ve been here long enough to know where the door is.’

And that was that. Unemployment was high in Cannonbridge and still rising; there was certainly no massive demand for clerks approaching middle age.

Derek daren’t tell Lisa he’d failed but allowed her to believe his efforts had been successful. ‘My salary’s being raised from the beginning of next month,’ he told her, in the mad hope that something would happen to rescue him before his savings finally ran out. The greater part of these had already been swallowed up by his courtship and honeymoon, above all, by that wildly extravagant North African honeymoon; he had had no idea until then that it was possible for two people to spend so much money in fourteen days. And week by week the relentless expenses of his new life bit savagely into what was left of his nest-egg. He felt himself beset these days by problems, every one of them relating at some point to money. And in his dreams now the feet were getting closer.

Lisa had given up her job before the wedding and appeared to have no intention of ever again darkening the door of any place of employment. She was in any case now three months pregnant and as a consequence exempt in her own eyes from all but the very lightest endeavours.

He turned from the window, suddenly hungry, and made himself some toast. He sat down at the table, buttered the toast and smeared it with marmalade. He took a thoughtful bite.

Until his marriage he’d had scarcely any idea how expensive it was to run a house. Before he took to bedsits he had lived with his father in an old rented terrace house in a seedy area of Westfleet, a small town twenty-five miles from Cannonbridge; he had been born and brought up in the house.

Derek was an only child. His mother had run off with a neighbour when he was six years old and there had never been any other woman in the life of the deserted father and son.

His father – now dead – had been a labourer in the yard of a builder’s merchant in Westfleet. He was out of doors in all seasons and as time went by he became afflicted with chronic bronchitis. ‘Don’t do what I’ve done,’ he warned Derek when the time came for him to leave school. ‘Get yourself a job that’ll shelter you from the weather, one that’ll keep your hands clean.’ And that much at least Derek had managed to do. Lowly as his status was at Cannonbridge Mail Order, it had always seemed an achievement to him – until his marriage.

The bronchitis finally carried his father off when Derek was nineteen. ‘I haven’t amounted to much,’ he said to Derek on the day before he died. ‘You’ve got your whole life before you. Watch out you don’t end up like me.’ His gaze wandered round the dismal bedroom. ‘I’ve left you everything.’ Everything amounted to forty-odd pounds in the post office, some tools, a cupboardful of cheap clothes and a few sticks of worthless furniture.

The landlady didn’t wait for the earth to settle over his grave before she marched round to the terrace house.

‘I want you out of here inside a fortnight,’ she informed Derek. ‘I’m going to do this place up and sell it.’

She knew her man; Derek moved out at once without protest, almost with apology, into the first of his bedsits.

Now he blinked away the memories with a jerk of his head. He finished his toast and went over to the dresser, pulled open a drawer and took out a handful of bills. He sat down at the table to study the figures although the amounts were accurately burned into his brain. He clenched a fist and dug it into his chin, frowning down at the papers, trying to think of some way out of his difficulties. At last he blew out a long breath and stood up. ‘Something’s got to be done,’ he said aloud.